Episode 22 of the reborn Retronauts podcast was posted over the weekend, which I guest starred on! We spend a good hour and a half or so trying to wade through the massive lineage of Kunio games, beginning with the brawlers (the sub-average Renegade, the cult classic River City Ransom to its various sequels/spinoffs) through the xtreme-ish sports games (beginning with the rad but sluggish Super Dodgeball, and eventually branching out to most other major sports, including the silly USA-based basketball game, Ganbare Dunk Heroes.) There are a few things I wanted to note, partially because we ran out of time, and partially because the
Kunio article on the site needs a bit of updating, so consider this an addendum to both:
-I think I quoted the name of the Japanese gangs as "bousouzuka" when it's actually
"bousouzoku". Whenever I get around to revamping the Kunio article I want to include a quick dictionary of some of the terms related to this subculture.
-All versions of Renegade are awful, but the Euro-exclusive, Natsume-developed Sega Master System port is the least awful. Maybe the upcoming 3DS remake will be better, but it sounds ridiculously thin given that it's a retail release.
-Here is a picture of the referenced title screen for Renegade III:
Yes, it is awful. Here's a
longplay to show you why.
-And here is a picture of Nijiiro Dodge Ball: Otome Tachi no Seishun:
As you can see, it's more or less identical to the Kunio dodgeball games, but with an all girl squad.
On an unrelated note, www.hardcoregaming101.net seems to be busted and I don't know why...I'm assuming it's something with the domain registrar. In the meantime, the direct URL,
http://hg101.kontek.net will work OK. Same deal with the Castlevania Dungeon -
http://castlevania.kontek.net is good to go. What an excellent day for Go Daddy to screw up, right on the 25th anniversary of the series. In fact, hopefully you can view this post through somewhere that isn't just a news reader. I guess we'll see!
UPDATE: Turns out my ISP is having issues with DNS forwarding, or something like that. So if you have Optimum Online like I do you may have issues, otherwise it's business as usual!
Stage 009 of Warning a Huge Podcast came out recently, which I’ve finished and have thoughts on, plus I provide links to all of Grasshopper’s podcasts, plus some coverage of the “8-4 Play Japan Game Panic” podcast, which I was recently made aware of. I've not had too much time to listen to stuff, since I've been modding Mega Drive systems and selling off my entire retro collection, but I always gotta make time for some WAHPing.
What I like about WAHP is it gets right to heart of Japan’s problem of appealing to the west, and their declining market, and while a lot of websites and print magazines elsewhere kind of agree that something’s wrong, none of them have really explored the situation and given what I would regard as satisfactory conclusions, whereas WAHP will take the various comments from industry people, and go to town on why things are falling apart – if indeed they even are. This episode introduced Bucchake Watch (pronounced like "chuck hey"), where industry insiders say outlandish things, and it’s incredible listening.
There’s an ice dungeon broken into three parts, and half way through part 2 I was low on supplies and close to game over, so fought hell-for-leather trying to get back to the entrance to leave and return to town. Which I did, restocked and then saved. Only to find that the second entrance to the ice dungeon was blocked off, since by exiting it I think the game thought I’d completed it. Except I hadn’t, and so the flag to open entrance 3 hadn’t gone up. In the end I couldn’t return to the second part, and wasn’t allowed in the 3rd, and so was stuck forever with a broken save file. Bloody frustrating. If anyone knows a way around this I still have my old save file somewhere. And this was several hours into the game – so I can’t even hear its name now without feelings of frustration returning. (A quick check on RHDN mentions something of a glitch in Dejap’s original translation patch – I’m unsure if this Ice Pyramid glitch was introduced by them, or not).
As for the Grasshopper’s Flower, Sun and Rain podcasts, I was disappointed to find there isn’t a dedicated page listing them all. At least I couldn't find one on the website. Thanks to Glider on NTSC-uk though, I now have a list of direct links to them. Again, I’ve downloaded them, but not had a chance to listen at all. Still, I hope this makes it easy to find them. Copy and paste into your browser, except the first URL which is crazy long (and I'm not even sure where it's being hosted...).
